Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
NICE’s Draft Guidelines on Cannabis Prove That Its Methods Don’t Work and It Is Causing Harm to Patients
The draft guidelines produced by the NICE committee are nothing short of ridiculous. There is a complete absence of common sense and an absurd failure properly to consider all the available evidence.
But it’s actually much more serious than this. It is now abundantly clear that this committee, its membership and its conclusions were only ever intended to delay, obfuscate and sabotage the reforms which were introduced in November last year because of a public outcry.
The selection of members of the committee is by any standards corrupt. The most highly qualified people have been deliberately excluded. Anyone publicly expressing support for the use of cannabis as medicine has been rejected whereas those selected have frequently expressed opposition. The inclusion of the ‘reefer madness’ advocate Professor Finbar O’Callaghan is both reprehensible and inexcusable. If the man had any ethical standards or conscience he would recuse hismself. The committee is a confidence trick.
The medical establishment, the Home Office and all the various regulators, including the MHRA, the FSA and the Royal Colleges are all institutionally opposed to cannabis and they are doing everything they can to stop it reaching the people who can benefit from it. Cannabis, the more intelligent approach to medicine it both requires and inspires, threatens too many vested interests and the comfortable, self-satisfied and self-serving model of healthcare that prevails in Britain.
But if any NICE apparatchik or fat cat pharma supremo thinks they can stop cannabis they are fooling themselves. From right around the world the overwhelming weight of expert opinion and patient experience reveals that what is happening in Britain is merely delaying the inevitable. But in the meantime it is causing great suffering and unnecessary harm to patients. It is a scandal of the highest order and the people responsible for it must be called to account.
CLEAR has responded to the consultation on the draft guidelines in great detail. Without reproducing our line by line commentary, these are our three general observations.
1. The entire guideline is characterised by a failure to consider observational evidence and real-world experience. Cannabis is the oldest medicine known to mankind and failure to give substantial weight to real-world experience of its safety and efficacy is nothing short of absurd. Given its illegality over the past 100 years, the wild scaremongering about its recreational use and therefore the lack of formal clinical evidence, this is simply setting it up to fail. It is irresponsible in the extreme to fail to consider the enormous benefit at very low cost and the very few adverse events associated with illicit cannabis.
2. There is little evidence of potential for harm for cannabis for any medical condition. Given the enormous numbers using cannabis in its most potent form as a recreational drug and/or self-medicating (estimated at 250 million regular users worldwide) there are far fewer adverse events or incidents of harm than for common over-the-counter medicines.
3. The weight given throughout the guideline to the potential for harm of cannabis is wildly disproportionate. There is no evidence of any significant harm from cannabis when used as a medicine, especially when under the supervision of a medical professional. At least 10,000 years of human experience shows that cannabis is essentially safe. Seeking to evaluate its safety in the same way as a new, experimental medicine, synthesised in a lab for which there is no real-world experience is a fundamentally flawed approach. Unlike potentially dangerous or unsafe medicines, cannabis can and should be offered to patients on a ‘try it and see’ basis. Instead of being over-cautious, clinicians should welcome this approach and can be certain that it will benefit patients whether or not in proves effective in individual cases.
Review. ‘For Ava’. For the Shame of Simon Harris, Fine Gael and the Irish Government
An extraordinary book. Vera’s achievement as a novice author matches her achievement as a novice campaigner. I’ve worked with people who use cannabis as medicine for 40 years and I thought I was pretty hardened to the tragic and distressing stories but the tears were running down my face as I read this.
I was concerned it might be a rather turgid list of events but far from it, it is a riveting read. It is almost like a thriller, beautifully structured, it grabs you and won’t let you put it down as you have to turn to the next page.
The central message is of the inhumanity of bureaucracy and self-serving politicians who are not interested in an issue unless it can bring them easy and positive media coverage. They are impotent in the face of lobbying from vested interests such as the pharma industry and the medical establishment and prefer to do nothing rather than risk controversy, even while children suffer needlessly.
A magnificent achievement and SHAME on Simon Harris, Fine Gael and the Irish government. They will face judgement at the highest level for their inaction, cowardice and feeble conduct.
After Three Years Bickering, Parliament Must Now Submit To The People
HM The Queen has agreed the prime minister’s request to prorogue Parliament. This virtually extinguishes any chance of MPs being able to delay Brexit any longer. It looks, at last, as if democracy will prevail in the UK and the people will have defeated the outlaw Parliament.
How did this shower of incompetents ever get elected in the first place? How did they come to so badly misunderstand the public mood that they set Parliament against the people? And how have they so badly mismanaged their own affairs that they are now shut out from causing any further delay?
At the root of it is our corrupt and profoundly undemocratic political party and constituency system. We never have any real choice of who to elect as our MP and most of them are so arrogant that they don’t give a damn what we think anyway. The only options we are presented with are candidates who have been selected by out-of-touch party activists and in most constituencies it makes no difference how you vote because the sitting party will always win whoever they put up as candidate.
It’s no suprise then the quality of candidates is so poor or that once in power they maintain a system that gives as many of them as possible a job for life. As they’ve shown by the way they have fumbled their attempts to wreck Brexit, they are useless, useless idiots. Perhaps only half a dozen worthy of any respect.
The truth is that British democracy is not fit for purpose. It serves the political class, not the people. We need root and branch reform. If I had my way, at the next General Election I’d bar all sitting MPs from ever standing again. I’d rearrange all constituency boundaries strictly on the size of the population. I’d introduce a system of primaries where each party had to put at least two people up for voters to decide who would be the candidates. I’d make MPs legally obliged to represent their constituent’s views based on local opinion polls and their contract of employment would require minimum standards of service in trms of deaing with constituents’ issues, complaints and emails.
I fervently hope that Brexit will cause a massive shake up of these incompetents and many will decide not to stand again. The gravy train has come to the end of the line and they can’t even catch the shuttle to Brussels now for a cozy retirement plan.
Never Understimate The Power Of Leadership
At last! After three years of miserable, negative, guaranteed-to-fail incompetence, we have a leader who will make things happen.
Theresa May was a dreadful home secretary and our worst ever prime minister. Everything she did at the Home Office went wrong. To use the adjective she once chose, she’s a nasty politician, and the Conservatives were stupid, utterly barmy, to make her leader. As I’ve written before, she never had an ounce of leadership ability. She is an authoritarian bureaucrat, a pen pusher with out-of-date, out-of-touch, discriminatory and spiteful ideas and no ability at all but administration. I wouldn’t put her in charge of anything except an office full of not very bright book keepers.
Boris is exactly what Britain needs.
They say he’s Marmite but I don’t agree. I like lots but there’s also some that I dislike. He’s flaky, unreliable and I wouldn’t lend him a tenner. If you gave him your bag of coke to go to the loo with, you wouldn’t trust him to bring it back.
It doesn’t matter. he’s still the right man for the job.
The EU and the particularly oily Michel Barnier have totally humilated us. Our negotiating position and ability have been atrocious, worse than useless. It’s time now to remind the EU that they are dealing with Britain, the fifth largest economy and the world leader in soft power,
We have let our star fall far too far. It is time to put things right and Boris is the man to do that. After he’s got us through this we can put someone serious and boring in charge.
Boris To Back Cannabis?
I believe the stars are aligned. The time is right. Cannabis law reform has become a political opportunity instead of a problem and Boris Johnson is the politician who could exploit it for his personal advantage but also for great benefit to the whole nation.
Public opinion is now clearly onside. According to the latest poll, twice as many people (48%) support legalisation as oppose it, an overwhelming 77% support legal access to cannabis as medicine and 22% support legalising ‘grow-your-own’.
Remarkably this poll was commissioned by the newly-formed Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group, a development which itself shows how dramatically opinion has changed, even amongst the party of government.
The headlines around Michael Gove’s past use of cocaine led to an outpouring of confessions from politicians of all parties and those who admitted to consuming cannabis brushed it aside as of little consequence.
The evidence coming from Colorado, which legalised five years ago, is very clear that legalisation works and there have been no significant negative consequences. In Canada and California, which legalised more recently, aside from teething troubles, everything is looking good.
The economic case for legalisation is very strong with estimates predicting at least £1 billion up to as much as £7 billion net gain from additional tax revenue and reduced law enforcement costs.
The thunderous clamour from international business is becoming deafening. If the UK doesn’t catch up with the fast-moving pace of reform it is going to lose out very significantly.
It’s clear the police have absolutely no interest, nor the resources, to enforce the laws against personal possession, consumption or low-level cultivation of cannabis.
I hear from a very close and reliable source who works in the criminal courts every day, that throughout the system, judges, barristers, solicitors, police officers, probation workers, everyone thinks that there is no point in enforcing these laws anymore and they do more harm than good.
So, if next week Boris Johnson becomes PM, then probably on 31st October, if not very shortly afterwards, we will leave the EU. Then we will have a General Election because he cannot miss the opportunity while the Labour Party is in its present state of self-destruction.
A new Boris Johnson government will be radical. He will want to assert his credentials as a liberal and a supporter of business and free markets. He will also want to support the police and do something to tackle knife crime which is almost entirely driven by the failed drugs policy of prohibition. It will be a no brainer for Boris to back cannabis.
New NHS ‘Cannabis Clinic’ Announced as Kings College, Institute of Psychiatry Joins the ‘Green Rush’.
Dr Marta di Forti: “Cannabis-induced psychosis is a crisis which cannot be ignored”.
Mail on Sunday, 30th June 2019. NHS is forced to open Britain’s first clinic for cannabis psychosis to treat addicts of the mind-altering drug
Daily Telegraph, 30th June 2019. NHS opens first ever cannabis clinic as mind-altering ‘skunk’ fuels psychosis among users
Daily Star, 30th June 2019. First NHS clinic for weed addicts launched to treat cannabis-induced psychosis sufferers
The Times, 1st July 2019. NHS opens its first clinic to treat cannabis psychosis
Dr Di Forti, Professor Murray and their colleagues at the King’s College Institute of Psychiatry live in a bubble that is not replicated anywhere else in the world. The fantastic and frightening statistics that they publish are achieved through the use of complex, esoteric algorithms that generate theoretical projections which are regularly challenged by every other research team across the world working on the same subject.
Nevertheless, in the UK their theories are accepted as fact. Vigorously promoted by the King’s College press office, dutifully sensationalised by the Daily Mail and rarely challenged by other mainstream media, they are part of the anti-cannabis mythology which has a stronger foothold in the UK than any other country in the world.
Despite their best efforts, repeating the same or similar studies over many years, there is no evidence that cannabis causes psychosis, merely observational studies that show some people who are diagnosed with psychosis have used cannabis. Similar studies also show an association with drinking milk, energy drinks, using a skateboard, playing computer games or living in areas with heavy traffic pollution.
Research conducted at the Universities of Bristol and Cardiff, validated by further work at University of York, shows that the risk of a diagnosis of psychosis correlating with cannabis consumption is about 1:20000. See: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170420132334.htm By comparison the risk of being struck by lightning in a lifetime is 1:3000. See: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_lightningfacts.html. This puts the risk into proper perspective and explains why nowhere else in the world, including where far more potent varieties of cannabis are legally available, is this a problem of any significance.
A few unfortunate souls will need treatment for psychosis where cannabis, probably with other substances, has been a component factor in their illness but the risk of this is infinitesimally small and compared to the panoply of other substances, activities and experiences we indulge in, completely irrelevant to 99% of people.
This clinic is another example of the skilled PR operation which enables Kings College to continue repeating this research year after year without ever discovering anything new or useful. It’s also clear that they want their share of the ‘green rush’ of huge investment funding going into cannabis as legalisation continues its unstoppable and very welcome roll-out across the world.
Legally regulated cannabis will result in a safer, happier, wealthier world for everyone and far better protect those very few people who are vulnerable rather than leaving the market under the control of gangsters.
Letter to the Irish Independent, 22nd June 2019. ‘Let’s look at the evidence when it comes to cannabis’
Peter Reynolds of CLEAR confronts the reefer madness of Irish psychiatrist, Professor Patricia Casey.
See her original column: ‘Dangers of sleepwalking into legalisation of cannabis use’
In response to Patricia Casey (Dangers of sleepwalking into legalisation of cannabis use’, 15th June 2019), how much longer must we be berated by the sort of arguments that Professor Casey puts forward? At best her column is disingenuous and misleading.
The ‘Cannabis Risk Alliance’ was directly contradicted by another group, similarly qualified, just a few days later and by the overwhelming weight of medical and scientific opinion around the world.
Research shows the risk of mental illness with cannabis is one in 20,000. By comparison the risk of being struck by lightning is one in 3000.
Medical cannabis is not “use of cannabis of the CBD variety”. Bedrocan, the leading EU medical cannabis supplier has three products with THC content of 22%, 13.5% and 14%. It’s clear Professor Casey simply doesn’t understand the subject.
Cannabis has been used as medicine for more than 5,000 years and doctors around the world now prescribe it with enormous benefit to patients. Some 99% of Irish doctors have not been educated in the endocannabinoid system, through which cannabis works. In other countries, medical cannabis has special regulations. Trying to regulate a 500 molecule medicine in the same way as single molecule pharmaceutical product is impossible.
Professor Casey is wrong about the Netherlands. By separating the cannabis market from hard drugs, the rate of heroin addiction is one-sixth that of Ireland. So talk about a ‘slippery slope’ and a “softening up process” is simply mischievous.
I agree that government must be careful of vested interest groups but these include doctors funded by pharmaceutical companies. Psychiatrists only see people with a problem and are blind to the benefits that 99% of people experience.
Can cannabis be misused and cause harm? Yes. Is the risk as great as with alcohol or tobacco? No. Is it any more than with coffee, bacon or chocolate? Not really. It really is time we acted in accordance with the evidence and not on scaremongering which verges on hysteria.
Peter Reynolds
Doctors Are Frightened Of Cannabis. It Challenges Conventional Medicine And Threatens Their Status.
Professor Andrew Goddard and Professor Finbar O’Callaghan at the Health and Social Care Committee, 26th March 2019
The British medical establishment is behaving like a spoilt child that doesn’t understand the rules of a new game.
The irony is that it’s actually a very old game that went out of fashion just a century ago despite thousands of years of practice. The wisdom accumulated across those many years has been dismissed by simplistic, reductionist, allopathic medicine and its return is being driven by patients – real benefit that real patients experience in real life, surely the most important criterion of all.
The doctors responsible for drafting the medicinal cannabis guidelines from the Royal College of Physicians and the British Paediatric Neurology Association have failed patients. Either through error or design they have overlooked the evidence of safety and efficacy that is widely available. They say there is ‘no evidence’ when what they mean is there is no evidence that suits them. For some reason they regard medical practice in Canada, the USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain or Israel as not applicable to the UK. Their guidelines are not based on evidence but on the disregarding of evidence and they are merely the opinion of doctors who have no experience of cannabis at all.
These doctors who expect their ill-informed opinions to be treated as scientific fact are directly opposing the doctrine of ‘do no harm’. They stand by while scores of young children suffer life threatening seizures, while hundreds of thousands in chronic pain are offered only highly toxic, addictive and dangerous opioids.
Their arrogance, stubborness and self-serving preference for lengthy clinical trials from which they earn fat fees is both damaging quality of life and putting health at risk for millions of us.
Since Finbar O’Callaghan and Andrew Goddard gave evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee, over three months ago, neither of them, nor any of their colleagues in their ivory towers, have done anything effective to improve access to cannabis as medicine. They have decided that their opinion counts above everything else. They have no interest in what patients have learned from experience, sometimes over many years. They choose to ignore the expertise of thousands of doctors from other countries. They will consider the benefits of cannabis only on their terms. They continue to wildly exaggerate the possible harms and side effects and their position is fixed, stubborn and intransigent.
It was notable in the two professors’ evidence that they preferred only to talk about cannabidiol, where they could refer to the evidence of clinical trials. They didn’t want to discuss full spectrum cannabis at all. Why is it that physicians are so risk averse when surgeons are lauded and idolised for the most perilous use of the knife? They will slice into flesh only millimetres away from vital organs, remove sections of the brain which could kill or paralyse with the slightest error. Yet unbelievably, O’Callaghan actually does recommend slicing into a child’s brain rather than to administer a tiny dose of a very low potency version of a drug which 250,000,0000 people worldwide consume regularly with very few problems.
It’s all about ignorance and fear. O’Callaghan, Gardner and 99% of British doctors have received no education at all in the endocannabinoid system through which cannabis exerts its therapeutic effects and this challenges their status. In our culture, doctors have been treated as infallible, almost as Gods, never to be questioned, only to be obeyed. So a medicine that works, that is safer than virtually all the pills you can buy over-the-counter and has powerful, benefical effects for very wide range of conditions is a real threat to doctors’ status. It shakes their world and so they are eager to disparage it, exaggerate its risks, diminish its efficacy.
This is the real issue with cannabis. It gives medicine back to the people, literally for those who grow their own, and with it a great deal of the power and prestige that the medical profession has held over us.
Of course more and more doctors are opening their minds and learning. It’s the establishment that’s the problem, as it so often is in British life. It’s those at the top of the Royal Colleges, the professional institutions and the NHS bureaucrats at the intersection between money and medicine. These are the people that stand in the way of the most inexpensive, multi-purpose, safe, effective, easily tolerated medicine that we have.
The Next ISIS Assassin Will Be A White Woman With Leaflets
She’ll slip past a security cordon, invade a private area and everyone will sit on their hands, terrorised into inaction by the feminazi, left wing journalists and the whining trolls that are the Twitterati.
Next, HM The Queen, the Duchess of Sussex, a musician, movie star or philanthropist will be dead or have acid thrown in their face.
Theresa May makes the wrong call yet again and betrays Mark Field. He is a fool for having apologised. The BBC, now little more than a state-funded sinecure for Remainers and professional victims, ramps up the hysteria and criticism, a rallying call for conflict and division.
If the protestor had been found with a small bottle of acid or a knife, Mark Field would be lauded as a hero. Instead he is villified, castigated and abused. I express my view on Twitter that she was dealt with proportionately and then I’m smeared as ‘a man who supports violence against women’. The world has gone mad.
The person who is really to blame is whoever was in charge of security. It was an appalling failure and must be the end of their career. Absolutely unforgivable.
Given the occasion, the location, the attendees and the sudden, aggressive invasion, a 9mm double tap to the centre of the target would have been fully justified.
Which Conservative Leadership Candidate Has The Intelligence And Courage To Legalise Cannabis?
There are a host of strong, evidence-based reasons why legalising cannabis is a very good idea. It’s also an idea that fits perfectly with Tory principles of free enterprise, small government and fighting crime. In private, most politicians now realise this and that the present policy on cannabis causes far more harm than it prevents. But do any of the Conservative Leadership candidates have the vision to make this policy their own? It would be a massive vote winner at the next General Election and could rescue the party from its terminal decline into old age.
Dominic Raab. He probably understands the evidence well but may feel this is just too controversial a policy to help him overcome concerns about his relative youth and lack of experience. It would do wonders for his brand though and, on a good day, he probably does have the courage.
Esther McVey. Not a chance. If ever there was an anodyne, squeaky-clean, don’t rock the boat candidate for the twin set and pearls ladies at the local Conservative association, it’s Esther. Her candidacy simply isn’t strong enough to sustain such a radical policy.
Rory Stewart. With his background, no one should understand better the counterproductive nature of the war on drugs. He may have tried opium in Iran and he must have come across some the world’s finest hashish in Afghanistan. He has the knowledge and the vision but does he have the courage? His exciting campaign has the energy to take on this policy and make it his own.
Boris Johnson. Famously describing the idea that he had never taken drugs as “an outrageous slur”, Boris has confirmed that he has smoked “quite a few spliffs” and that “it was jolly nice”. But for all the bluster and bravado, he probably lacks the courage and this is a policy that requires diligent and patient explanation, so probably not something he’s well suited to.
Sajid Javid. Credit is due to the home secretary who finally moved on access to cannabis as medicine but this was probably more to do with asserting his new role in the cabinet. It is remarkable though that he achieved this while Theresa May was PM. Not only is she as regressive as they come on drugs policy, she also has a vested interest in keeping cannabis illegal due to her husband’s financial interest in GW Pharmaceuticals. Sadly though, Sajid is more likely to appeal to ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ Tories rather than those with intelligence and courage.
Andrea Leadsom. Mrs Leadsom is notable as one of the few Tories who treated the late Paul Flynn and his cannabis campaigning with respect rather than contempt and ridicule but she’s unlikely to be the sort of leader who would take forward such a bold policy. Please prove us wrong Andrea!
Matt Hancock. Forever to be defined by his dishonest testimony on the Leveson Inquiry whilst culture secretary, Hancock doesn’t have the balls for anything radical. He’s already punching above his weight at the Department of Health and his loyalty to the Fleet Street barons is unlikely to persuade him to challenge one of their favourite topics for sensationalism.
Michael Gove. Although strong on intellect and fully capable of radical policy, Gove is in serious deficit on sincerity and integrity. With Mrs Gove (Sarah Vine) as a rampaging Daily Mail hack, probably writing about a cannabis crazed axe murderer right now, this is probably a step too far for him and his natural constituency is older people, certainly in attitude if not in years.
Jeremy Hunt. Definitely the choice for conservative Conservatives, Mr Hunt probably understands the arguments but sees this as a policy for the next generation. Undoubtedly a decent man, a one nation Tory, made of stronger stuff than first appears but unlikely to want to put his name to such a controversial policy.
Kit Malthouse. One would have hoped that Malthouse’s previous role as London Deputy Mayor for Policing would have given him an insight into drugs policy but it’s a subject he seems strangely silent on. He apparently has no record of any comment on the subject at all. So he may be a dark horse but almost certainly one that won’t be anywhere near the finishing line.
Mark Harper. As an ex-Home Office minister it’s unlikely that Harper is progressive on drugs policy and it certainly isn’t a subject that he has any record on. He’s unlikely to be in favour of cannabis law reform but also unlikely to get anywhere in the leadership race. Hardly a reformer, more of a classic Tory stuffed shirt.
James Cleverly. Clever by name but not too clever in practice, James has confessed to smoking weed in his youth but of course it was all a ‘dreadful mistake’. He showed a terrible lack of understanding as one of the MPs to eagerly jump on the bandwagon of ‘middle class cocaine users being responsible for knife crime’. Not much hope of any insight, intelligence or courage here.
Peter Reynolds 